I know nothing about IIS, so I am going to contribute
basically nothing on-topic for this node. Sorry.

However, I do use Mason extensively. Your third bullet
above talks about finding a system that's easy for designers
to work with.

I'm working on a paper called "Working with Designers and
other non-Technical People". I haven't decided whether to
submit it for the ApacheCon or YAPC. In my experience, Mason
is far and away the best solution for parameterizing large
websites where multiple people will be doing work on it.

Mason's lead programmers are very focused on making Mason
non-mod_perl specific, and I do use Mason for email (one of
these days I'll post my vi scripts that let me do all sorts
of fancy Perl things in email and news) so it's certainly
workable outside of Apache.

TT is also a very viable solution -- it will probably be
faster than Mason, but I would still claim that Mason beats
it in terms of the working with non-geeks factor.

About a
year ago, Mason was in vogue in the Perl community; everyone
talked about how much it rocked. These days, TT has mostly
replaced it as the one to buzz about. I use both, and they
both have their plusses and minuses.

Finally, you might consider Zope and friends. While
tied closely to Python, Zope is not only Python -- most
of its features can be used without knowing any snake-speak
at all. And it has some great collaboration features that no
Perl product I know of has matched yet. I also know that Gisle
has been working on making Perl work in Zope, which would make
it an even more inviting choice.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other